Stories by Joss Fong

We’ve put robots on both the moon and mars, but scientists have never tried to soft-land a robot on a comet–until now. In this episode of The Countdown, we cover everything you need to know about the European Space Agency’s groundbreaking Rosetta mission.

Could Mars support life? In this episode of The Countdown, we run through five intriguing lines of evidence that the red planet was not always as desolate as it appears, and may even be habitable today.

Sleep is such a large feature of our lives that it’s easy to forget how utterly weird it is. Every night, if we’re lucky, our brain cells switch into a synchronized pattern, putting our lives and minds on hold for hours.

More to explore: ALMA Reveals Ghostly Shape of ‘Coldest Place in the Universe’ (National Radio Astronomy Observatory) United Nations to Adopt Asteroid Defense Plan (Scientific American) Earth’s Water Likely Came from Very Early Asteroid Strikes (Space.com) Sun Continues to Emit Solar Flares (NASA) Kepler Spacecraft Finds First-Known Tilted Solar System (Scientific American) And visit the [...]

Lifelike robots and animations can elicit a response that’s somewhere between uncomfortable and creeped out. Scientific American editor Larry Greenemeier explains why in our latest Instant Egghead video: More to explore: What Should a Robot Look Like?

Scientific American is part of Springer Nature, which owns or has commercial relations with thousands of scientific publications (many of them can be found at www.springernature.com/us). Scientific American maintains a strict policy of editorial independence in reporting developments in science to our readers.